Have the Scientific community published any of the research gathered on the effect of Wind Turbines on Climate Change or the Hydrometeorological effect that offshore turbines create? Just wondered. I am sure a few knight hoods wont go amiss in keeping every one on message.

"Two new studies (SUGGEST)" Well that's a pretty poor scientific study.. I think I will stick to the Max Planck Institutes work. Also while you at it can you find me some research work into the Hydrometeorological effect of offshore turbines..

"Two new studies (SUGGEST)" Well that's a pretty poor scientific study.. I think I will stick to the Max Planck Institutes work. Also while you at it can you find me some research work into the Hydrometeorological effect of offshore turbines..

"Two new studies SUGGEST" Well that's a pretty poor scientific study.. I think I will stick to the Max Planck Institutes work. Also while you at it can you find me some research work into the Hydrometeorological effect of offshore turbines..

What has happened to the GREEN HOUSE GAS. Germany hasn't registered lower March temp. for 150 years. UK coldest March in 50 years.. Where has all the CO2 gone?
WARM WET WINTERS. Predicted by the Meteorological office only 4 years ago.. No More Snow predicted. Seems like the Theory of Global warming has Ran away with the Science. I hope this isn't just another ploy to raise TAX.

Yeah wouldn't surprise me if a few climate skeptics think NASA faked the moon landings. One of the well known climate skeptics (roy spencer) is a creationist and another (monckton) is a birther. Conspiracy theories run ripe. I am not surprised they don't "trust" people.

If its Carbon Dioxide creating climate change then give it its real name.. GLOBAL WARMING.
Its called a Green House Gas.. What a shame for the Scientists who predicted this.. I wonder what models they used?

I'm not sure which "he" you are referring to here. If you're asking what's the connection between the loss of Arctic sea ice, "climate change" and "global warming" here's a YouTube video that explains the connection:

Well being a Scientist. Its best to look at the Facts. The World is witnessing the lowest temperatures on record for March 2013. Fact. Green House Gas CO2 raises the Temp. Fact.
Question.. What has happened to the CO2. Urbanization raises ground temp. So do Wind-turbines. Facts.

Showing Ice flows breaking in the Arctic is not the answer. Neither is showing the Growth of Ice in the Antarctic.

It's best not to try to debate with shrill alarmists exibiting the intelectual level of preschoolers like Soul Surfer and nebk.
The dabate on this article started off in a very civilised fashon untill they joined from their favourite link SkepticalScience or UnSkepticalScience as it's known to many.
All they are trying to do is shut down debate and divert traffic.

I've already pointed out to you that I didn't arrive here from SkepticalScience. If you bothered to check you might discover that I've been an Economist subscriber (and occasional commenter here) for many years.

Please stop telling porky pies about me.

As for "exibiting the intelectual level of preschoolers". Need I say more?

Unless you're the proud possessor of an ice breaking TARDIS it's a bit difficult to take the record of "historical images" any further back than that, is it not?

Note that the article I am commenting on bears the subhead "The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought" and the associated leader is headed "Apocalypse perhaps a little later".

Getting back to Dr. Francis' point about "This is something that anybody can see. You don't have to be a scientist", what do you suggest instead?

Now I'm confused!!...I thought you were suggesting that the fracturing of Arctic sea ice was a significant event, whilst I was suggesting that it may have happened many times before but as the 'historical' record in this instance only goes back 100 years at most (probably 30 years in practical terms), we would be completed oblivious if it had (and therefore it's not significant)! Now it seems you're agreeing with me!

Your "provisional" fact states that "the UK mean temperature was... three degrees below the long term average.".

What scientific logic do you employ to conclude that this is more relevant to "global warming" than the temperature in north east Greenland being TWENTY THREE degrees ABOVE the local long term average? Why don't we start with that fact?

If you look at temperatures right across the Northern Hemisphere. Mongolia, Germany, Siberia Temperatures are falling and are significantly lower than previous years. What Global warming CO2 emission Data can explain that? None that's a Fact. Magnetic flux shift can easily explain North East Greenland Temperatures shift. Global Warming through CO2 is Tax event and nothing more.

If you look at temperatures right across the Northern Hemisphere. Mongolia, Germany, Siberia Temperatures are falling and are significantly lower than previous years. What Global warming CO2 emission Data can explain that? None that's a Fact. Magnetic flux shift can easily explain North East Greenland Temperatures shift. Global Warming through CO2 is Tax event and nothing more.

For years now, supporters of AGW have cited world temperature data as the primary indicator of a world warming trend. Now, the world warming trend has abated. So, what is the response? SoulSurfer exemplifies the answer: abandon the use of the temperature trends and choose another indicator that still supports AGW. SS chooses a local phenonmenon - the extent of ice on the Arctic Ocean. Why not the Antarctic Ocean instead? Because that does not support AGW.

AGW is an example of Popper's falsification issue - a thgeory that can never be falsified is pseudoscience

If you choose to invoke the spirit of Popper here then surely you must realise that we don't have thousands of planets in thousands of test tubes to experiment upon. We don't even have the mythical "Planet B".
Perhaps a different paradigm is called for in these troubled times.

Going back to your assertion that "The world warming trend has abated". Can you by any chance suggest an experimental design that would allow an unbiased observer to refute that assertion?

There is little debate that the Roman and Medieval warm periods were hotter than the current period, at least in the northern hemisphere. Even Mann and co seem to accept this although they maintain that it wasn't a global warming. However, it's highly unlikely that with the northern hemisphere as warm (and there's plenty of data to suggest even warmer) than now, that the Arctic wasn't melting in a similar fashion. Only difference being we didn't have satellites at that point in time to witness it and get ourselves all in a lather!

It takes only ONE planet that contradicts Newton to falsify his theory of the motion of planets, not thousands. That is, unless contradictory data is always explained away.

The phenomenon I refer to is the continual search for alternative explanations for data that contradicts AGW orthodoxy. Rather than address the data that global warming trends have abated, you choose to discuss the melting of ice in one locality. The locality you choose is the Arctic Ocean, coincidentally where the ice cap is receding, and ignore data from the Antarctic Ocean, where it is not receding. This approach will NEVER lead one to a conclusion that the AGW hypothesis has been falsified.

The challenge to AGW is to explain the abatement of the warming trend, not to avoid it.

Can you see the negative temperature anomaly over northern Europe and the United States, and the positive temperature anomaly over western Greenland and the North Pole? If you don't read German try clicking on the Union Jack. Does that help at all?

Exactly the same argument has been made about the same phenomenon, when it occurred a thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warming period, in the same location. Only the conclusion was that the warming demonstrated that warming can occur WITHOUT man's intervention. The response in that case? It was a local effect. But this time this"local effect" has global significance, while effects in other parts of the world are conveniently ignored.

Exactly the same argument has been made about the same phenomenon, when it occurred a thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warming period, in the same location. Only the conclusion was that the warming demonstrated that warming can occur WITHOUT man's intervention. The response in that case? It was a local effect. But this time this"local effect" has global significance, while effects in other parts of the world are conveniently ignored.

Why do you choose to use melting of sea ice in the Arctic, a local condition, as an indicator, when we have a global indicator that indicates that global warming has abated?

Why is melting of the sea ice NOW evidence of AGW? Previous cases were dismissed as a purely local phenomenon with no global implications. Alternative explanations (changes in sea currents) are dismissed. The lack of a similar effect in the Antarctic is ignored, or explained away as a local phenomenon.

To me it seems that AGW advocates can always come up with some sort of explanation for anything, no matter what, as long as your explanation is consistent with AGW.

Then read my GCSE physics lesson linked to above. When you heat ice its temperature doesn't rise. It melts instead. What happens when its finished melting? Check out the graph.

According to Rear Admiral Jon White the Arctic ice cap will have largely melted for a month in summer within 10 years. What happens then?

Why does the Economist proclaim "climate change has plateaued" when their own invited experts were telling them a very different story only three weeks ago?

Mark says "If you look at temperatures right across the Northern Hemisphere. Mongolia, Germany, Siberia Temperatures are falling and are significantly lower than previous years." It doesn't sound like he thinks "climate change has plateaued" either, does it?

To repeat my most recent question - What would happen if sea levels rose to the levels last seen during the "Medieval Warm Period"?

For an All Fools' Day quiz about what's going on in Greenland underneath all that red in NASA's article, along with an intelligent discussion about whether or not one should trust The Economist these days, you may also wish to peruse:

He created an entire movement for renewable energy, from environmental political parties around the world, thousands of non-governmental organizations, to environmental religions, based on deliberately falsified studies!

He pulled millions from donations after receiving the Nobel Prize, awarded by Universities, telling lies about carbon dioxide!

Concealed that the greenhouse effect is due to increased nuclear periodic solar activity!

"30,000 scientists sue Al Gore for spreading false studies on global warming!"
Doesn't help that your comment starts with a lie. There aren't 30,000 scientists suing Al Gore, either past, present or future.
What this is a classic example of is how climate deniers wish-believe. Deniers WANT something like 30,000 scientists to be suing Al Gore so they pretend it's true (maybe even deluding themselves) and go around telling everyone it as if it's a fact. The shocking thing is they think they can get away with it. Most places they do indeed get away with writing such bald faced lies without being challenged.

The biggest challenge with climate modelling is the fact that besides conservation of mass, momentum and energy, a new conservation principle has to be included in models: conservation of political correctness. There are many examples showing that this is a fiendishly hard concept to include in models since it usually leads to a lot of waves, turbulence and hot air. This then feeds back into the climate models leading to a feed-back loop which takes is nowhere.

So the Greens want us to cut fossil fuel use because scientists think this might warm up the planet eventually but it not doing anything right now.
We are going to devastate the economy of the world by cutting fossil fuel use in order to protect us from boogy man that is probally not real.

If you think Green Energy will not cause an economy to be toppled you are out of touch with reality. The Cost Of Green Energy Toppled the government of Bulgaria. Why? Because Green Energy is costly, inefficient and unreliable. http://wp.me/pE1rC-5Yc In the Uk people are dying from the cold due to the high cost of Green Energy they cannot afford http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea... High green energy costs = more poverty = more children dying http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r... Green Energy is not the answer it is the problem. Affordable Energy Is A Human Right!

Fossil Fuel is affordable, abundant and reliable unlike energy from Solar, Wind turbines and Bio fuel which have to be subsidized with tax payer dollars to survive, is unreliable (when cold or the sun is under cloudy skies) wind and solar don't work to well and provide a fraction of the energy coal, oil and natural gas does. Again, people are freezing to death in the UK due to the high cost of green energy, the government in Bulgaria is being overthrown due to high cost green energy and power outages. In the US there is enough energy from fossil fuel to last over 200 years. Green activists who are denying people access to affordable and reliable energy from fossil fuel say they are for the poor but in reality they are driving people into energy poverty and in the UK people are freezing to death because of it. I honestly don't know how people can sleep at night knowing their false beliefs in global warming are killing people. See my post above for the links.

arno arvak comment below "Satellite Temperature data shows no rise in temperatures for 33 years" If you are a scientist trying to find out if carbon dioxide causes warming you have to add carbon dioxide to air every day and also measure air temperature every day. If I were that scientist and if after fifteen years of doing this nothing happened I would decide that my experiment is a failure: adding carbon dioxide to air just does not cause any warming. But if fifteen years is not enough for you Ferenc Miskolczi has results for 61 years. What he did was to use NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 to study the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. He found that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. The addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever upon the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. There is your explanation for the lack of warming for the last fifteen years. But Miskolczi's result applies to all time, not just this time. It follows that there has been no greenhouse warming in the past either and warming attributed to greenhouse in the past is either faked or is misidentified natural warming. At he present time the most accurate temperature records are those from satellites and I have studied them carefully. As my published work three years ago (What Warming?) proves ground-based temperature curves show a phony warming in the eighties and nineties called late twentieth century warming. This warming does not exist. According to satellites there was nothing there at the time except an alternation of ENSO oscillations while global mean temperature stayed constant. The three leading ground-based temperature sets - GISSTEMP, HadCRUT and NCDC - all showed that warming. And last fall they all switched over to the satellite compatible data without telling anyone. Which means that we now have another eighteen year stretch of no-warming time in the eigties and nineties which is longer than the current no-warming stretch. Those ENSO oscillations were then followed by the 1998 super El Nino which brought so much warm water across the ocean that it caused a step warming. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. This and not any greenhouse warming is responsible for the very warm first decade of our century. Hansen points out that nine out of ten warmest years belong to this period. This in itself tells us nothing about global warming because all those warm years sit on a warm platform created by the super El Nino of 1998. There has been no warming since then and there was none before either, back to 1979. This leaves no time for any greenhouse warming within the last 33 years. And did I mention that anthropogenic global warming is impossible without the greenhouse effect?

You're published work is a joke. There are five reviews at Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/What-Warming-Satellite-global-temperature/dp/14392.... This one appears to be accurate in light of your posts here:
[Joel Shore review:] "This book is nonsense. ... Clearly, the author of this book has absolutely no clue what he is talking about."
Even better, you try to respond to specific comments, and at least twice your posts get this wonderful review by Amazon: "[Customers don't think this post adds to the discussion. Show post anyway.]"

How would giving the much higher polluting and CO2 emitting factories in China an even bigger competitive advantage over our clean factories result in less CO2 and real pollution?
That is all that the idiotic Kyoto type treaties would do.

"OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar."

Before you ask, yes, I did read the entire article. However most people won't, and the author surely knows this.

To begin the piece with a favorite talking point of climate change denialists, which is based upon cherry-picking the strong El Niño in 1997-1998 as a starting point for which to declare that surface temperatures have been flat, says a lot about the authors intent.

Take a look for yourself, and ask yourself why author author chose 1998 as the the starting point for which to determine the recent short term trend, as opposed to 1996:

You lost me, and i'm sure most neutrals, in this debate the minute you typed "denialists". References to the holocaust and it's implication that skeptics should have some sort of guilt at questioning the science or the models on which climate science has been built tell me everything I need to know about you.

Don't be absurd.
Everyone knows exactly what is meant by 'denier' or 'denialist'. It has long been part of the everyday vernacular.
The word denier dates from the 15th and simply means 'one who denies'.
The best dictionary definition I've come accross is this one.

"...Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions...."

That definition fits climate change deniers to an absolute 'T'.
There is simply no other word in the English language that is more apt.

e attempt by deniers to falsely equate the term with the Neo-nazi holocaust deniers is disgusting. It is as cowardly as it is disingenuous.

That the deniers have such an inflated sense of self worth as to call themselves 'sceptics' is absolutely laughable and an insult to genuine sceptics everywhere. The sceptics society themselves issued a public statement saying so.
A denier is just about as far from being a sceptic as it is possible to get given their naive and gullible acceptance of any and every piece of psuedoscientific gibberish and lies that they believe fits their selfish personal and political agendas.
If the cap fits wear it and spare us your faux outrage. It's just silly.

I think "Holocaust denier" is the term you're thinking of. I have never heard the term "denialist" used in reference to the Holocaust unless it was understood that what the subject of discussion, which clearly is not the case here.
"In science, denialism has been defined as the rejection of basic concepts that are undisputed and well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a topic in favor of ideas that are both radical and controversial"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

I became an AGW sceptic about 20 years ago when the IPCC changed the contents of their reports so they would match the political summaries of those reports.
I had learned in grade nine science class that the summary should have been changed to match the report's findings instead of changing the facts in the report to match the political summary.

Presumably you are the one to decide if they are "undisputed" parts. I think the word you are looking for is skeptic (or if from Europe sceptic).
That is the accepted term in polite scientific discourse.

Science has never been decided by consensus, even although you may wish it to be otherwise.

The Trenberth paper you refer to has been debunked already. All they did was splice two incompatible data set together and model the results. Just another model fail, but their methods are worse than Mann's hockey stick.

Everything is debunked according to the deniers.
They say the greenhouse effect is debunked. That human CO2 rise is debunked. That ocean acidification is debunked. That the temperature records are debunked. That global ice loss has been debunked. That the ice cores are debunked. Ad infinitum. You can be sure that if anything comes along they don't like, they won't hesitate to deny it by claiming it's been debunked.
That's when they're not just making up lies, such as the claim above about Al Gore being sued by 30,000 scientists or the bogus claims below that Mars is warming, or that the UK Met Office has said no warming for 15 years, etc etc.

The mixing from effects of El Nino/La Nina are localised and relatively small scale globally.

Are you seriously suggesting that the heat has mysteriously managed to find its way to the 700 - 2000m level without having been detected first going through the 0 - 700m level by ARGO. That would be some feat of thermodynamics.

It's been debunked because you say so!!!
Ha ha ha.
You people are hilarious. Of course the denialists would say that wouldn't they. Like they say about the other 13,950 peer-reviewed studies that provide evidence for AGW.
And by the way - Mann's hockey stick has been corroborated and vindicated and independantly verified so many times I've lost count. Just endlessly parroting "it's been debunked" merely illustrates the paucity of your 'arguments'.

At last count there were around 14 or 15 hockey sticks - all from different teams using different proxies in different countries - and they all show the same thing.
Please show me a past global temperature graph that does NOT show a hickey stick. I can't find a single one.
And please - don't insult us with the Central England data that Monckton uses and then cuts off in the 1950s and then claims it's a global graph. We're not stupid.

You mean that Mann's hockey stick was corroborated by the Marcott et al paper? Thats's the paper Marcott has now decided has No blade after all only a handle. I'm afraid even the IPCC have disowned Mann's hockey stick but that's not what we are discussing here.
If you want to engage in a full discussion of why Trenberths "missing heat" is still missing, assuming it ever existed in the first place, why don't you go over to Prof Judith Curry's site at Climate Etc. There you will find an explanation why even his own side are disowning that one.If the warmist/lukewarmist scientists don't convince you, there is little point in me pointing you in the direction of a neutral source.

I am genuinely wondering, much-esteemed bloggers of either side of the debate, has any of you come around to see the other side's point of view? If so, what argument was put forth that convinced you of the errors of your thinking? Just wondering... Oh, where is Monty Python when we need it the most?...

It is the nature of the internet that you'll have the vast majority of comments on "controversial subjects" such as this dominated by people who really don't know what they are talking about. Most I am sure have never even taken an undergraduate level course in atmospheric dynamics or climate.

I don't think this reality should dissuade people from trying. There are many well-established and heavily published climate scientists who have informative blogs- realclimate is one example, Isaac Held is another. Some people think idiots like Anthony Watts routinely dismantle the entire infrastructure of climate science...or instead prefer to ground their reality in a handful of talking points they heard somewhere (e.g. global warming stopped xxx years ago, CO2 lags temperatures in ice cores, etc) rather than a real understanding.

Ultimately you need to think of commenters on these things as a bell curve...some people are on the fringes, a lot of people are just observing, and a handful are actually literate in the science.

As one of the neutrals in this debate I have looked at all sides of the debate. I notice you did not identify yourself as a writer who has made a point of publishing only alarmist, and how shall we put it, material of dubious scientific value.

I have only one question to you. If the views expressed in Realclimate.org are to be accepted as gospel, why does the owners of that site need to delete all dissenting comments?

There is NO 'debate' on AGW among the scientific community and there hasn't been for decades.
Stop pretending there is.
There are virtualy no creditable qualified climate scientists who dispute AGW. If there were the denialists would cit them rather than the laughable fake 'experts' and paid frauds they rely on.
Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed research papers published in the last 20 years a grand total of 24 dispute AGW

24 out of 13,950

What leads you to accept the conclusions of the 24 rather than the 13,926?

I absolutely agree. It amazes me how certain climate scientists have made a career out of researching/reviewing inconvenient facts and redefining them to fit their theory. The Roman Warm Period and MWP being particular examples.

There are more facets in climate change. While I hold specific opinions to global warming, but I think we overlooked a few other issues.
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Soot is discussed in this article - I don't think we really understood soot's role in climate too good yet (IPCC gives very large error bars to soot's role in climate). But there is one thing is clearly certain about soot: soot is an air pollutant (it is one of the stuff that causes smog), and is a public health issue. There are other minor or not fully understood greenhouse gas such as tropospheric ozone, which are public health risks.
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Another devil in the climate change is to change of climate extremes. We may be able to deal with a 1C warming or so, but large swings in droughts and floods are big killers.
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We really need a much broader view in changing Earth environment. You may question global warming, but I don't think anyone can disagree that humans are changing the face of Earth greatly. We got to move beyond obsessed how many degrees Earth is going to warm (or even cool!).

Just a small addition to the comment on soot. More soot from the atmosphere is found covering glaciers, snow etc than ever before. They can tell this by the ice cores that are done. The black covering increases the absorption of heat from the sun and warms the ice even faster.

Perhaps the writer of this article ought to have done a bit of thinking before writing this misleading article.

They portray the lower estimates of climate sensitivity, from a few researchers (around 1.9-2.0°C per CO2 doubling) as being somehow "safe" because this makes some hope that we could probably handle that amount of warming.

Like many people trying to make the sceptical/denialist case, they do not think it through. If the policy makers of the world thought such a value of sensitivity was "safe", what do you think would happen? There would be few, if any, attempts to reduce emissions, so atmospheric levels of CO2 would carry on rising faster.

Here's a question for the sceptics - what makes you think levels would stop just at a doubled value from pre-industrial times (280 -> 560ppm)? Why would humanity not, in due course, double that again to 1120 ppm which would lead, even using the rose tinted "get out of jail free" sensitivity of 2°C, to 4°C of warming, which no one sane can dispute would be highly dangerous.

To those who don't think we could get to 1120ppm with just our fossil fuel, fracked gas, tars sands etc remember that the Arctic is warming a lot more than most and there is a lot of tundra/permafrost up there already starting to melt, which will be releasing large amounts of CO2 as the frozen organic material decomposes. Not to mention the increased out-gassing of CO2 from the oceans as they warm too.

So, even if these lower sensitivity figures are valid, we are still facing a very dangerous situation and articles such as this one, that try to make out we are not, are reckless and irresponsible.

Just burning fossil fuels, no feedbacks included, gets us to around 900 ppm by 2100.

Unfortunately, this economist article is wrong. According to paleoclimate, long term sensitivity for 360-410 ppm CO2 is 2-3 degrees C increase. 450-550 ppm CO2 sensitivity is 5-6 degees C increase. Just look at the Miocene and Pliescene. It's nothing more than wishful thinking that long-term CO2 levels this high won't result in about this level of warming.

Not to mention the huge amount of methane hydrate below Arctic seabed at low deeps. Its destabilization would suddenly inject methane gas into the atmosphere. Likely to have already happened in the past.

During the last decade or so the level of temperature increase from a doubling of Co2 has fallen,according to the modellers, from estimates of up to 10 deg C down to a current 1.9 - 2.0 deg C.Even the latest figures require large feedbacks to justify it. Why do you not think there is good reason to believe they are still wrong and that it may even be less than 1 deg C due to negative feeback from water vapour?

John WB "During the last decade or so the level of temperature increase from a doubling of Co2 has fallen,according to the modellers, from estimates of up to 10 deg C down to a current 1.9 - 2.0 deg C"
Total rubbish. You don't know what you're talking about and must be ignorant of what the science actually said - as opposed to what the denialosphere asserts it did.
The IPCC equilibrium climate sensitivity of ~3°C is a "most likely" figure derived from graphs which aggregate many different lines of evidence into a range of values. The graph goes from low to high with a conspicuous "bell curve" bulge centring on ~3°C but it does still, and always did, tail away up to 10°C. What has happened in recent years is that the very high figures of the range are now being ruled out as too unlikely and this is what you interpret as them "changing their minds".
The evidence you think gives "a current 1.9 - 2.0 deg C" is still the work of individual scientists hyped by the scepticosphere but that figure was always in the IPCC graph of the probable range of sensitivity figures, it just had (and still has) a lower probability of being the correct figure than the IPCC accepted one. Nowadays, as virtually all the other arguments and memes of the "sceptics" have fallen by the wayside, they have very little left apart from arguing about the sensitivity, and that is why the work of these few individual scientists is being highlighted by loud voices. The much larger body of work, that suggests that those individuals who advocate a lower sensitivity figure are probably wrong, still stands.
It seems highly irresponsible to bet the future of civilisation on the work of a few being right when the aggregated work of the majority shows they are almost certainly wrong. Do you feel lucky, punks?

Here's a question for the sceptics - what makes you think levels would stop just at a doubled value from pre-industrial times (280 -> 560ppm)? Why would humanity not, in due course, double that again to 1120 ppm which would lead, even using the rose tinted "get out of jail free" sensitivity of 2°C, to 4°C of warming, which no one sane can dispute would be highly dangerous.

Here's an answer.

1 - Those figures would not be possible. Humanity does not have that kind of CO2 generating capability

2 - CO2-driven warming is not linear, but logarithmic. Such an increase in concentration would take us to a flat part of the curve, and not increase the warming effect by any perceptibkle amount

3 - The temperature increases you quote are NOT directly caused by CO2. They are hypothesised to be caused by CO2 increases driving up water vapour concentrations which in turn drive up temperatures. This is the proposed AGW mechanism which will cause us all to fry.

However, over the last 20 years, water vapour concentrations have actually gone DOWN. So the fundamental heating mechanism proposed simply is not operating at all. No one knows why - my guess is that thunderstorms are very efficient at scavenging extra heat and delivering it to the stratosphere, and thence out into space. So I also guess that, if your extreme CO2 concentration were somehow to be applied to the current Earth, that our temperatures would remain roughly the same as today...

I think you just confirmed my point. Figures of up to 10 Deg C per doubling were talked about as you have confirmed. Did we hear other climate scientists calling out these charlatans? Of course we did not. Now that the most recen published material is suggesting around 2.0 Deg C you appear to be calling these into question without presenting any evidence.

Nothing I said confirmed your point. If you have biased blinkers on, I suppose you might have misread it that way. What part of the "long tail of the graph" did you not understand? In any event climate sensitivity is far more complex than the single equilibrium C.S. figure (which is actually a range of figures with varying probabilities still including a long tail) that denialists concentrate on.

The long term sensitivity figures are far more worrying.

Why do you accept the most recent material as automatically superior? The nature of publishing peer reviewed science is that quite frequently new work has subtle errors in it which only gradually become apparent, such as, for example, Lindzen and and Choi's work over the last 5 years

Truly Pathetic..The Economist has been kneeling at the church of man made Warming for years. Unfortunately the facts and data are not cooperating.

So instead of admitting you were wrong you hide behind more slight possibilities in order to keep the myth going. How craven is that.

And for those who say we better do something "just in case" do you have any idea how much money has already been spent on this S science and how much more it would take to reduce or eliminate a threat that appears at this point to be non-existent.

The world is currently awash in debt and you want to spend trillions (not billions) "just in case"; especially when there so many REAL problems that need solving.

One thing is for certain :we have found that money assets and capital are NOT unlimited. So you want to throw capital we don't have at a problem whose existence is very much in doubt.
JLK

ALL the facts and data are 'co-operating' as you put it.
Almost every projection has been realised except more quickly than the IPCC expected.
The Arctic has lost 80% of it's ice volume in the last 30 years - as projected but much faster - you seriously believe that this has nothing to do with global warming and that it is not affecting the northern weather systems?
I mean really!?
Please show me your 'co-operating data' which proves that the loss of 80% of Arctic ice is NOT having an effect on the climate and/or weather systems.
Peer-reviewed research only please.

The very existence of humans on earth is natural. Our evolution to the point where we can manipulate elements in our environment to our advantage was a natural occurrence. How then, can anything we do now be considered unnatural? Our very ability to perform the actions such as building cars and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere was handed to us by nature itself. Our production of CO2 is, therefore, natural.

Lets be real here, the planet is not in any danger. Species die out all the time, it's part of existing on this planet. Millions of years ago, when plants began to produce Oxygen, a naturally toxic gas, this radically changed the atmosphere of the planet. Many many species died as a result of this. And yet, life went on. And no one is blaming plants for the extinction of animals the way we blame ourselves.

This planet as endured explosive forces far beyond our comprehension for hundreds of millions of years. Whole continents have drifted apart, crashed together, volcanoes erupting, mountain ranges being thrust up and beaten back down, the most powerful weapon we possess could barely scratch the surface of this earth. It is not the planet that is in danger. We are the ones in danger.

Climate Change hysteria is born out of a desire to maintain the status quo, to maintain life as we know it. They say it's to protect the environment, but nature doesn't need our protecting, nor can we do much to protect it in the first place. Let's abandon this farce of protecting the environment and start calling things like they are. We don't need a better reason to recycle and be mindful of pollution than our own survival.

"A rise of around 3°C could be extremely damaging. The IPCC’s earlier assessment said such a rise could mean that more areas would be affected by drought; that up to 30% of species could be at greater risk of extinction; that most corals would face significant biodiversity losses; and that there would be likely increases of intense tropical cyclones and much higher sea levels."

Not a straw man at all. This is an argument for other species and the earth, not Humanity's ability to continue surviving on earth.

It is natural, because humanity's existence on earth is natural, and everything we do, the capability to perform those acts was naturally assigned to us. Therefore, everything we do, even manipulating the elements around us, is natural. Thus, production of CO2 is natural.

You are operating under the assumption that humans, through manipulating our environment, are creating things that can not be made by nature. in fact, because humans are naturally occurring on the earth, and because we can not create anything that does not already exist in nature, the production of CO2 is a natural occurrence, no matter what volumes are produced.

No I am operating under common definitions, and I believe dictionary definitions of words. If you want to define the word naturally to mean something else than everyone means, fine, but you'll be forever on the wrong page from everyone else.

Here is some rather disheartening news for our AGW nutjobs from NASA, the good side:

#

For the three day period, March 8th through 10th, the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. Infrared radiation from CO2 and NO, the two most efficient coolants in the thermosphere, re-radiated 95% of that total back into space.

In human terms, this is a lot of energy. According to the New York City mayor’s office, an average NY household consumes just under 4700 kWh annually. This means the geomagnetic storm dumped enough energy into the atmosphere to power every home in the Big Apple for two years.

“Unfortunately, there’s no practical way to harness this kind of energy,” says Mlynczak. “It’s so diffuse and out of reach high above Earth’s surface. Plus, the majority of it has been sent back into space by the action of CO2 and NO.”

During the heating impulse, the thermosphere puffed up like a marshmallow held over a campfire, temporarily increasing the drag on low-orbiting satellites. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, extra drag helps clear space junk out of Earth orbit. On the other hand, it decreases the lifetime of useful satellites by bringing them closer to the day of re-entry.

The storm is over now, but Russell and Mlynczak expect more to come.

“We’re just emerging from a deep solar minimum,” says Russell. “The solar cycle is gaining strength with a maximum expected in 2013.”

More sunspots flinging more CMEs toward Earth adds up to more opportunities for SABER to study the heating effect of solar storms.

"This is a new frontier in the sun-Earth connection," says Mlynczak, "and the data we’re collecting are unprecedented."

Stay tuned to Science@NASA for updates from the top of the atmosphere.

"biggest puzzles in climate science.."
Really? This same article could have been written several years ago if the Economist hadn't adopted a narrow editorial position accepting the alarmist's position as gospel. Other climate scientists have been arguing convincingly against the secondary effects of CO2 ever since the Charney report speculated about it in 1979.

"Norwegian report....not been peer reviewed, it may be unreliable."
There has never been a peer reviewed paper demonstrating proof of the so called "positive feedback" or secondary amplification of CO2 effect. That didn't seem to stop the IPCC or the media.

"half trillion tonnes of carbon since 1750 and temp has risen .8C.." Implies that the next half trillion tons will do the same. But all scientists agree that the effect is logarithmic. If we're halfway towards doubling now we already have 70% of the temperature rise. The other half of the doubling will give us the other 30% of the rise.

I propose that this is a good point at which the Economist should revise it's editorial policy to take a journalistic approach to this subject and report unbiased facts rather than continuing to jump on the bandwagon for carbon taxes and uneconomical alternative energies.

People who promote the Catastrophic Climate change theory are not planet or people champions Their high co2 tax will hurt poor, economy & nature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rORiooCvMac People in the UK are finding this out as thousands of people are dying from the cold because they cannot afford the high cost of energy brought on by high carbon taxes and the higher cost of alternative energy. It's not Catastrophic Climate Change people should be worried about people should concentrate their advocacy efforts on energy poverty.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9959856/Its-the-cold-not-global-warming-that-we-should-be-worried-about.html#disqus_thread What is ironic is that the very people who claim they want to help the poor, the Liberals, are the ones most in the front line of advocating for higher energy costs and so called "green" energy. Green Energy that is costly, unreliable and is harmful to the environment.

I could not agree more to what you wrote. The Economist was part and parcel of the AGW charade. If they would have adopted unbiased journalistic approach on this issue and other issues that fall under political correctness I would have subscribed to it.

I could not agree more to what you wrote. The Economist was part and parcel of the AGW charade. If they would have adopted unbiased journalistic approach on this issue and other issues that fall under political correctness I would have subscribed to it.

You should check your numbers on doubling.
For an outlay of 1 at 6% per annum, doubling occurs just before end year 12. At the end of year 6, the ratio is about 1.42 so about 58% of the doubling is in the following 6 years.
Any accountant knows this as the rule of 72 (6 into 72 gives 12 years).
Halfway in time you will always get about 42% of the eventual doubling if the rate of increase is constant..

If you are a scientist trying to find out if carbon dioxide causes warming you have to add carbon dioxide to air every day and also measure air temperature every day. If I were that scientist and if after fifteen years of doing this nothing happened I would decide that my experiment is a failure: adding carbon dioxide to air just does not cause any warming. But if fifteen years is not enough for you Ferenc Miskolczi has results for 61 years. What he did was to use NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 to study the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. He found that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. The addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever upon the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. There is your explanation for the lack of warming for the last fifteen years. But Miskolczi's result applies to all time, not just this time. It follows that there has been no greenhouse warming in the past either and warming attributed to greenhouse in the past is either faked or is misidentified natural warming. At he present time the most accurate temperature records are those from satellites and I have studied them carefully. As my published work three years ago (What Warming?) proves ground-based temperature curves show a phony warming in the eighties and nineties called late twentieth century warming. This warming does not exist. According to satellites there was nothing there at the time except an alternation of ENSO oscillations while global mean temperature stayed constant. The three leading ground-based temperature sets - GISSTEMP, HadCRUT and NCDC - all showed that warming. And last fall they all switched over to the satellite compatible data without telling anyone. Which means that we now have another eighteen year stretch of no-warming time in the eigties and nineties which is longer than the current no-warming stretch. Those ENSO oscillations were then followed by the 1998 super El Nino which brought so much warm water across the ocean that it caused a step warming. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. This and not any greenhouse warming is responsible for the very warm first decade of our century. Hansen points out that nine out of ten warmest years belong to this period. This in itself tells us nothing about global warming because all those warm years sit on a warm platform created by the super El Nino of 1998. There has been no warming since then and there was none before either, back to 1979. This leaves no time for any greenhouse warming within the last 33 years. And did I mention that anthropogenic global warming is impossible without the greenhouse effect?

Thanks for pointing out Fedorov et al. about Pliocene. I wanted to see what he thinks of El Nino and discovered that he is totally confused. To him, "A major factor in the warmth of the early Pliocene was the persistence of El Niño in the Pacific; it contributed to global warming..." That is utter nonsense. It is impossible for an oscillation to persist because that is what an El Nino is. What happens is that trade winds push warm water west until they are blocked by the Philippines and New Guinea. There the water piles up and forms the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. When the water is high enough gravity flow starts eastward along the equatorial countercurrent. It takes the form of an El Nino wave that runs ashore in South America, spreads out north and south along the coast, and warms the air above it. Warm air rises, interferes with the trade winds, mixes with the westerlies, and we notice the arrival of an El Nino by its warmth. But any wave that runs ashore must also retreat. As the El Nino wave retreats water level behind it drops half a meter, cold water from below wells up, and a La Nina has started. Now the existence of this oscillation depends critically upon the blockage of trade winds in the west and reflection of the the El Nino wave by the continent in the east. These conditions exist only in the Pacific today. And they came into existence with closure of the Panamanian Seaway, slightly less than two million years ago. All this is lost on them because they did not read my book (What Warming?). They don't have the dates right either because they talk of the seaway closing four or four and a half million years ago. Their own figure 3(upper) shows and even dates closure of the seaway very well. My advice is, don't refer to anything you don't understand in anything you write.

Arno, you attributed to super El Ninho of 1998 the current warming. In fact, as Economist article points out, much of the warming had happened before and during 1998, while, I add, the main phenomenon in recent years is the reduction in Arctic ice.
In 1996 summer it peaked to an extension like that of twenty years before, then it started a downward trend, more pronounced after 2005; winter ice is thinning rather than shrinking, because heat comes from below.
Source for extent data: www.nsidc.org
I must assume that Princeton University paper was peer-reviewed for facts, if not for its thesis, so I do not want to dispute about dates and Panama; I'll read your book.
The main argument of Fedorov et al. that prompted my attention is the effect sea surface temperature has on cloudiness, then on albedo and heat balance.
We are performing an experiment on Earth. Barring the chance to remove Panama to restore a waterway, we are trying to stop further glaciations by raising CO2 concentration to Pliocene values - or more.
My opinion is that we shall succeed.
Feedback effects of switching Arctic Ocean ice from permanent to seasonal may be serious and are of course part of the experiment.
Massimo Roscio

If my PhD was in particle physics, I WOULD suck on it. Fortunately for me, mine is in engineering. All of those advances in technology you refer to have been a direct consequences of the efforts of me and my colleagues. You have my condolences.

Clearly more attention to more variables that might be influential is needed, and the analysis will get better over time. For example, the effect of melting ice needs to be made more explicit. More importantly climate scientists need to develop some sort of meso-model interface which bridges between estimates from the top down and bottom up approaches and affects each, and then back test their models against those influences. That is, predict each of the last several overlapping decades from the previous several decades, weighted appropriately. There are plenty of statisticians around who know how to do the latter, it's a matter of building the bridge between the models.

The plot of temperature variation in D6k's link illustrates the ignorance (or mendacity) of some of the pseudoscience promoting AGW. The data shows a sudden change in temperature in the recent past, and an absence of short term variation in the distant past. The techniques used to estimate temperatures in the distant past do not have the resolution to resolve short term variation, so they only show gradual changes. Were there temperature swings 10,000 years ago that are similar to what we have seen recently? There is no way to determine this.

Indeed these investgators need a better understanding of the limits of their measurements.

Rob S.,
Tamino has literally thousands of posts on climate change. Perhaps you could be somewhat more specific. If you refer to the most recent post, the data are not his. He is merely explaining why there is an upspike--it has to do with the proxies they used, which start to peter out in the later 1800s. If you bothered to read the post, you'd know that.

And Geezer, don't worry. Tamino is aimed at people with at least an average intelligence, so it's not surprising you don't understand it.